Somerset Maugham: The Skeptical Romancer

"The impression left by strange towns and cities is often a matter of circumstance, depending on events in the immediate past; or on the change which, during his earliest visit, there befell the traveller."

"I admire the strenuous tourist who sets out in the morning with his well-thumbed [guidebook] to examine the curiousities of a foreign town, but I do not follow in his steps; his eagerness after knowledge, his devotion to duty, compel my respect, but excite me to no immitation.  I prefer to wander in old streets at random without a guidebook, trusting that fortune will bring me across things worth seeing; and if occasionally I miss some monument that is world-famous, more often I discover some little dainty piece of architecture, some scrap of decoration, that repays me for all else I lose."

 

"You cannot tell what are the lives of these thousands who surge about you.  Upon your own people sympathy and knowledge give you a hold; you can enter into their lives, at least imaginatively, and in a way really possess them.  By the effort of your fancy you can make them after a fashion part of yourself.  But these are as strange to you as you are strange to them.  You have no clue to their mystery."